Matthew's Journal

LJ have broken cross-posting from DW

2022-02-01T15:47:49Z

I have been automatically cross-posting my DW entries to LJ for some time now (since April 2017), and AFAICT this has mostly Just Worked.

The DW folks recently said that LJ have stopped co-operating with them about the cross-posting feature; they used to pass-list DW's IP so that even if one person put in the wrong password, most people would still be able to cross-post and now refuse to do so (or even acknowledge that they used to).

I have also been pointed at section 9.2.6 of the current LJ ToS, which prohibits "use [of] automatic scripts (bots, crawlers etc.) to [...] interact with the Service".

So it looks like it will no longer be possible to have my DW entries cross-posted to LJ (and indeed the most recent couple of entries haven't made it across); I'll copy this entry over by hand, but I don't think continuing to do so regularly is going to happen.

If that's going to be a problem for you, do comment, but do please consider joining me over at DW (or using your OpenID account to read me on DW)...

2021 Hugo Award: Best Novelette

2021-11-24T18:10:38Z

I managed to read all of these and get my vote in just before the deadline. All six of these were good stories, and it was hard to rank them.

The Inaccessibility of Heaven, Aliette de Bodard; a well put together mystery tale with fallen angels
The Pill, Meg Elison; holds an uncomfortable mirror up to how we treat fat people and the pressures we put on them to lose weight
Monster, Naomi Kritzer; a well-realized if grim tale of biology, bullying, and betrayal
Two Truths and a Lie, Sarah Pinsker; this is a horror story about a children's TV presenter, weird and well-written
Helicopter Story, Isabel Fall; it was good to actually get to read this after all the kerfuffle around its publication, it's very angry and has a disappointingly binary view of gender, in my opinion
Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super, A.T. Greenblatt; a superhero with a not very useful power in a world where they are not valued, this is a well-constructed story, and putting it last feels a bit mean

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2021 Hugo Award: Best Short Story; Best Series

2021-11-15T20:56:35Z

The voting deadline is approaching, and I'm not going to get everything read in time. I have, however, read all the short stories, and will be voting thus:

"Open House on Haunted Hill", John Wiswell. A moving story, with humour, and I liked the sideways take on the haunted house trope.
"Metal Like Blood in the Dark", T. Kingfisher. I don't want to spoiler this, but I liked the issues raised and it's a pleasing story.
"Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse", Rae Carson. An affecting story, and a pleasing change from standard zombie fare.
"A Guide for Working Breeds", Vina Jie-Min Prasad. Fun if unsubtle parable about labour and the choices we do and don't have about our work.
"The Mermaid Astronaut", Yoon Ha Lee. A nicely constructed tale, takes the little mermaid in not entirely expected directions, but didn't move me.
"Little Free Library", Naomi Kritzer. A charming tale, but the plot felt a bit telegraphed.

I've read enough of three of the nominated series to form an opinion on them, so will be voting thus:

"The Murderbot Diaries", Martha Wells.
"October Daye", Seanan McGuire
"The Lady Astronaut Universe", Mary Robinette Kowal.

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Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies, the Secret Barrister

2021-11-01T18:49:34Z

I read The Secret Barrister's eponymous first book in 2020, around the time I was in Nottingham for IVFDF. Fake Law is their second book, and is about how (and to some extent why) the law and its operation is systematically misreported (by media and politicians).

Each chapter follows a similar structure, for different areas of law: some headlines and interview / twitter snippets are outlined about a particular case or cases, and then the author goes through the facts behind the cases concerned, how the law in that area actually operations, and how the misinformation was harmful to the individuals concerned and/or wider society.

I think that is, perhaps, a key message of this book - the law is not just about the individuals concerned in a particular case; we like to think we live in a country ruled by laws, but there has been a distinct trend in recent years to undermine the rule of law - either by direct and mendacious attacks on judges from those who should know better (and/or whose job it is to uphold the independence of the judiciary), or by blocking access to the courts to all except the very rich, or by encouraging us all to think of law as merely something that happens to other people. The Secret Barrister's argument is that the rule of law is there for all of us: to ensure that the executive can be answerable to the laws made by parliament, to ensure that we are all treated fairly (for example, that my employer who acts legally is not disadvantaged by doing so), that the state cannot deprive us of property or liberty without due process, and so on. Law only works if everyone can rely on it being fairly enforced.

They are a persuasive and clear (if occasionally slightly condescending) writer. A weak point is perhaps that while the short final chapter does outline some structural improvements that might be made, I didn't come away from reading it feeling like there was much I could do (send my MP a copy??) to improve the situation... This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/764838.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

2021 Hugo Award: Best Novel

2021-10-27T19:25:37Z

I've read them all now, so time to vote!

I struggled a bit to rank these, but this is where I ended up:

Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin
Network Effect, Martha Wells
The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

The voting deadline is 20 November, so I really need to get to the shorter fiction soon! This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/764566.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

2021-10-27T19:10:01Z

This is the last of the Hugo novel shortlist.

It's a strange and beautiful book; an enigma. Try and read it without spoilers the first time! The narrator lives in the House, a vast labyrinth of halls filled with statues of things that do not otherwise exist in the House. The upper levels are cloud, and the lower levels filled with water. The only other person in the House is the Other, who calls the narrator Piranesi. The narrator is studying the house, trying to learn of its wonders.

This is a book that will reward a re-read, I think, although I don't know whether I will thereafter like it more or less. There's a lot going on here, and the ending felt like it was fair, too (which isn't universal in mystery stories!) This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/764351.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

When Sorrows Come, Seanan McGuire

2021-10-14T18:48:30Z

This is the 15th October Daye book, and it is basically fanservice. Toby and Tybalt are getting married, at last! If you're invested in these characters and their relationships, you'll enjoy this book (if you've not read any of this series, don't start here!). It was fun to spend time with all these characters again, though the plot felt a bit light. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/763134.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

A couple more 2021 Hugo Novels

2021-07-29T17:16:44Z

Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse. This is the first of a series (I don't know of how many; a sequel is due out next year); it's a fantasy novel set somewhere that isn't obviously European (if you see what I mean); there is magic, a conflict between old a new gods, four POV characters, and a lot of flashback. I was a bit worried at the start that I'd not be able to keep all the various elements organised in my head, but that didn't turn out to be an issue. I liked the different voices of the POV characters, the sense of a coherent world (though there was the odd bit of "let me show you how much world-building I've done"), and that the plot had some interesting twists without feeling contrived. It builds nicely to the climactic scenes, too.

The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal. Another prequel novel to "The Lady Astronaut of Mars", this is later than the events of The Calculating Stars. I broadly liked this, and the plot had more tension than The Calculating Stars, although I felt that an infectious disease outbreak and governmental failure relating to climate change were perhaps a bit too contemporary right now!

I just have Piranesi to go from the Novel shortlist now... This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/760384.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Some 2021 Hugo Novels

2021-07-13T16:16:02Z

Past form suggests if I wait until I've read all of them, I'll have forgotten what I thought about at least some of the first-read novels from the Hugo shortlist, so, in order of reading:

Network Effect, Martha Wells. Another Murderbot story! I really enjoy Murderbot - a page-turny adventure with a whole load of digs at capitalism and reflection on what it means to be human. There's not much new to the formula in this book but the ART / Murderbot interactions around the killware-Murderbot they make were interesting, and I enjoyed the various reactions to the kidnapping-as-negotiation-strategy incident. If you've not read Murderbot, start with All Systems Red and read the series in order.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir. I really enjoyed Gideon the Ninth, to which this is the sequel and was really looking forward to reading it as a result. I'm afraid to say that while I found myself compelled to keep reading to find out where the book was going, I didn't really enjoy it, which is mostly because I didn't understand it, even having got to the end. At the end of Gideon, Gideon kills herself to turn Harrow into a Lyctor (and save the remaining survivors from Cytherea). Much of Harrow looks like its pretending this didn't happen (because the bits set in Canaan House are actually a bubble in the River), as it turns out that Harrow arranged with Ianthe to wipe Gideon from Harrow's memory (hence the baroque arrangements of notes to give people and so on). This may (I'm not sure it's clear in canon) be a scheme to prevent Harrow from totally destroying Gideon's soul - hence the second-person narration, which is Gideon describing events as she observes them. How this ties up with The Body (who we think is God's cavalier) remains unclear.

Likewise, what the state of things is at the end of the book is very confused, even by middle-of-trilogy standards - we think God survived by the assistance of Ianthe, and presumably Harrow/Gideon survived (though who is driving that body is unknown), and maybe Ortus' cavalier in Ortus' body? And we are invited to presume that it's Harrow/Gideon who wakes up in a maybe-different-era apartment with Camilla Hect right at the end, but that might well be misdirection.

But much of that is really unclear almost throughout, and I had to refer to the plot summary on WP to put some of it together afterwards. It's structurally very clever, but I'm afraid I'm too stupid to "get" it; maybe once I've read the forthcoming final part of the trilogy I will come back and go "wow, that was actually very neat", but at the moment my inclination is more to say "Read Gideon the Ninth, and leave it at that unless you are smarter than me or like being confused".

The City We Became, N. K. Jemisin. I imagine you get more out of this if you know New York well, but I still really enjoyed it. I like the ideas, the social commentary (which never quite crosses over into feeling preachy), the sense of place in the different boroughs, and the way the various characters and their abilities evolve. Another one I had difficulty putting down! I imagine people from one particular of the five boroughs may feel hard-done-by, mind you... This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/759371.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

2121 Hugo Award: Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.

2021-06-28T10:45:45Z

I've now watched (and reviewed!) all of these, so time to rank them:

The Old Guard
Palm Springs
Tenet
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
Soul
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

You may have seen the reviews I've written previously, but I would happily recommend the first two films if you've not seen them yet. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/757628.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Tenet

2021-06-28T10:39:12Z

This is the last of the films off this year's Hugo Award shortlist. There is a very complex time-travel plot here, which I think doesn't in fact stand up at all, but there are a series of delightful (and delightfully silly) action sequences (a number of which we see twice) which try and keep you from thinking too hard about the plot. It's trying very hard to do a bunch of clever stuff, but doesn't stick the landing. Also, some of the dialogue is a bit hard to make out, which is an error in a film that is already pretty confusing!

The word tenet is a palindrome, and it's also the middle word of the Sator square (all of the other words show up too); the central conceit of the film is that technology has been invented that allows objects to move backwards in time - like in the trailer where the Protagonist "fires" an empty gun only for the bullet to end up moving from the target back into the chamber. Naturally the baddies want to use this technology to end the world. There's also a MacGuffin that the baddies want to hide where baddies in the future can find it to facilitate this Armageddon.

Like many such plots, this immediately lands us with the ontological paradox (here called the Grandfather paradox), which the film has characters talk about confusingly. I think that's an error - you need everyone to suspend their disbelief for long enough not to notice that all this going backwards and forwards in time is probably meaningless, not explicitly remind us of the fact!

And it's almost good enough that you can - you spot the sequences where someone/thing is going backwards and that's cool (and quite neatly done), and the action set-pieces hit that sweet spot of impressive and slightly camp that invites you to enjoy them without taking any of it too seriously. But I don't think the plot holds up, the sole female character of note is well-acted but stereotyped, and Robert Pattinson's slightly louche charm isn't enough to cover for a lot of rather 1-note performances from the other leads. Also, some of the dialogue is pretty hard to make out over the background noise, which made it even harder to work out what was going on sometimes.

All of which is more negative that I quite wanted to be - if you can suspend your disbelief, there are some very entertaining moments in this film; and I like the ambition of the plot even if the execution didn't match up. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/757250.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Soul

2021-06-05T14:00:41Z

The penultimate short-listed film for the Hugo Award this year, Soul is a Pixar film about Joe Gardner, a jazz pianist and teacher; and 22, a soul who is stuck in the Great Before. It's a beautifully-animated film with a great soundtrack and some very funny moments (and far too much cringe for my liking!). But I found the plot rang hollow (and its ontology(?) was very strange), and it dragged surprisingly for a relatively-short film.

There are a number of things that I thought were a bit off about the model of reality here. Everyone "in the zone" is by themself - even Joe, who vanishes off by himself while playing with the quartet, which is an oddly individualistic understanding of making music: a great performance is when we're in the zone together in the band, surely? The idea that one's personality is fixed before birth is pretty problematic, too - what does it mean if the narcissitic megalomaniac really was born that way? Are they thus blameless or simply beyond redemption? It feels like they're trying to have their cake and eat it, too, with the whole spark/purpose thing, too: Joe gets his gig, it's brilliant and then he's very "is that it?" (OK, leaving open the question of whether his spark is in fact helping others to find theirs), but also the plot shows Connie finding her passion for the trombone as an important point.

The plot is not without holes, too - like what happens to the cat's soul? We see it on the escalator to the Great Beyond when Joe invades its body, so what's inside it when Joe is restored to his body and the cat bounds off to its owner? It also seemed odd to give Joe a "second chance" when the film to that point had in some sense been his second chance already; it would have been more in-character for him to decide to go into the Great Beyond at that point, I felt.

And the implied point that actually it's all about being in the moment and finding beauty in the fall of a sycamore seed is very Mindfullness, but rang hollow to me. Maybe the point is, in fact, "if only America had universal healthcare people could actually follow their dreams rather than being trapped by the need to get a job with health insurance"? This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/756410.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Freaks; The Vast of Night

2021-05-30T16:35:44Z

We've watched a couple of films that weren't on the Hugo shortlist!

First was Freaks (the 2018 Scifi, not the 1932 horror); Chloe lives with her father, who insists on covering all the windows and never letting her leave the house. He teaches her to pretend to be normal (e.g. to have opinions on baseball, a sport she's never seen), and tells her that the bad men will try and kill her if she ever goes outside. I can't say much more about the plot without going into spoilers, but one of the things I liked about this film was that you spend quite a long time wondering what is going on - is the father paranoid, bad, or is there actually danger outside? Why all this talk of normals?

All becomes clearer as the film goes on, but the plot has plenty of twists, and the characters are all pretty believable, underpinned by some really good acting. Recommended.

The other was The Vast of Night, which is a Scifi mystery set in 1950's New Mexico. It's a curious piece - there's some distancing framing (as an episode of "Paradox Theatre Hour"), there are precious few close-ups, and the genre nods are liberally scattered (the radio station is WOTW, for example); and it's definitely a slow-burner despite only being 90 minutes long.

I rather liked it; there are some great moments (oddly, I found the hyper-efficient switchboard operator fascinating), and it's very well placed in its setting without becoming historical fiction. It's an atmosphere piece more than anything else, I think, and it builds that atmosphere very effectively. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/755950.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Slightly more general dealing sheets; Android again

2021-05-10T14:37:56Z

Shuffling is not the most interesting part of card games, and folk are often not that good at it; you get more interesting bridge hands if a computer shuffles, for example. Also, I've been looking at playing cards that are more suitable for outdoor use, and they tend to be less easy to shuffle. Which has got me thinking about dealing sheets again (and thus Android apps).

When playing bridge in person (such a long time ago now!) I've been dealing off a friend's handy web dealing sheets - each number tells you which pile to put the card onto, and you end up with a properly-random bridge deal.

Bridge works really well for this approach - you deal out all the cards, and their order within a hand doesn't matter. So using a dealing sheet is basically no more effort than dealing from a shuffled deck in the usual manner.

There are plenty of games where this approach doesn't work so well - games like patience or Bezique where you need to order the entire deck (I'm not sure if there's a not-totally-awful way to do that). I think there are intermediate classes of games where the deal is more hasslesome, but the wins of not having to shuffle (and always getting well-shuffled hands) might still make a dealing-sheet a viable approach...

Take cribbage - you'd still deal into four piles - two hands of six, the starter, and the rest of the deck. And most of the time you could stop part-way through the deck (I'm sure one could calculate the expected distribution of end-points...). So you could have a very similar output, and add a "stop" instruction rather than printing out the rest of the "put all these cards onto the 'rest of deck' pile".

Which brings me back round to thinking about a smartphone app - the webpage is great for bridge, and for places where you have a network connection, but I do wonder if a dealing app would be useful for offline use (and could be extended to support other deal types). Last time I collected opinions on app development there were some interesting suggestions for my stated preferences of Free, drivable from the command-line/my editor, and buildable for F-droid. I have subsequently become aware of Nativescript (for various varieties of JavaScript, none of which I speak), Kotlin (seemingly the new default Android language), and Flutter (a new language and framework entirely). I don't know if anyone's tried any of those (or other approaches)...? This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/754393.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Palm Springs

2021-05-05T16:02:50Z

Another Hugo shortlist entry. I wasn't really expecting to enjoy this, as romcoms are very much Not My Thing, but I actually thought it was pretty good (and had plenty of laugh-out-loud moments).

The premise is a wedding day that is an infinite time-loop for a few of the characters - one of whom has been looping for ages, another of whom gets stuck in the loop at the start of the film; so we learn about what's going on as they do. Despite Groundhog Day not being explicitly mentioned ever, this is a plot device that's been used before, but I liked the fun (and near-absence of cringe comedy) and humour of this, as well as the hints of darkness (there's a nihilism under the surface that is never lingered on) that made the characters much more sympathetic.

At 90 minutes, it doesn't outstay its welcome, either. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/753881.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

The Old Guard

2021-05-04T15:52:05Z

Third of the Hugo shortlist, and the best so far by a comfortable margin. The premise here is a small band of almost-immortal mercenaries; what they do with their time, what it's like being a new (and very old) immortal, and what happens when someone thinks they might be useful to Big Pharma...

This was more interesting and less just-endless-fight-scenes than I was expecting (though the fight scenes are very well done!), although it was still a fairly predictable plot (while Obbxre tvivat Naql na rzcgl tha was a twist we didn't spot coming, we both said "Zreevpx'f fgvyy va gur cragubhfr" when gur yvsg jnf frra tbvat qbja). Some of the character motivations around key plot points felt a bit flat, though. I'm not sure the plot as a whole entirely stands up to scrutiny, either...

I did like that all the characters are pretty competent (including the villains), and that most of them (the exception being Merrick) have complex motivations. I like that there's a central queer relationship that isn't just one aspect of the relevant characters. And the fight scenes are very well done :) This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/753449.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

2021 Hugo Award: Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

2021-05-02T13:28:13Z

atreic and I thought it might be fun to watch the Hugh short-listed films this year. I'm beginning to think this may have been a bad idea...

We figured alphabetical order is as good as any, so started with Birds of Prey. This is a DC Comics film about Harley Quinn, and the events that spiral from her break-up with The Joker. It has a similar sassy fourth-wall breaking energy to Deadpool, but is nothing like as funny; and while I enjoyed the chaotic roller-coaster series of events, I didn't find myself caring very much about the plot. Also, I'm not sure this is really SF/Fantasy - it has the same sort of cartoon physics/violence of a James Bond movie, but beyond one appearance of Oynpx Pnanel'f pnanel pel novyvgl there is essentially no paranormal activity here. Entertaining enough, but nothing to get excited about.

Rom-coms are not really my thing, and I can't abide cringe comedy. But I do enjoy Eurovision. I absolutely hated Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, though. The plot is entirely predictable - we were both waiting for the boat to sink/blow up some time before it actually did, for example; and this means there is never any narrative tension, because the inevitability of the plot bulldozes all before it. The characters are unbelievably stupid even by genre conventions - how does Lars get through check-in (never mind home and out to work the next day) without anyone mentioning the result? How can he get a flight home at zero notice, but no-one has a mobile?. It's not very funny (OK, here I must admit my hatred for cringe comedy again); I think I laughed twice in a 2-hour film. And it's not even a very good Eurovision parody - Love Love Peace Peace was both funnier and understood its material much better.

Lars and Sigrit are meant to have grown up together as childhood friends, but Lars is clearly much older (there's an 11-year age gap between the actors). And is it really OK to make a series of jokes about how Icelandic people are all in-bred, cast hardly any Icelandic actors, and then make almost no effort to even try and get the accent right? It's particularly dreadful in the final Husavik, meant to be an emotional end to the film, where Will Ferrell's pronunciation obviously awful - and entirely unnecessary!

Dreadful, dreadful film. In slightly-redeeming features, Graham Norton as himself is quite amusing (though rather phoning it in), and Husavik is not a bad Eurovision-style number.

Anyhow, so far I still think that Possessor (which, alas, didn't make it onto the ballot) is miles ahead... This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/753286.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

On init systems

2021-02-02T15:43:17Z

Systemd is in many ways an improvement over System V init (sysvinit), but I worry about the direction it seems to be going in (and how upstream interact with folk), and I think distributions need to work a bit harder to preserve user choice in this area. ISTM there is space for a more tightly-focused new init system.

A little background - the first process started at boot is process 1, often called init. It is the parent of every other process on the system, and is responsible for bringing the system up (and shutting it down again). For a long time, on Linux this was sysvinit. It is pretty simple, but could be slow to start up a system[0] because it started services up in serial, and it didn't have much in the way of machinery for tracking the state of processes - it couldn't, for example, notice your sshd had crashed and restart it for you. There are plenty of people still running sysvinit (I run it on a system at home, because I'm too lazy to re-write the firewall script), since it remains by and large good enough for a lot of applications.

There have been a number of attempts to improve on sysvinit, the first of which to get significant traction was Upstart, but I think Debian choosing systemd over it (and thus causing Canonical to drop it in favour of systemd) killed it off. Fairly rapidly, systemd has become the default in most distributions. It has a number of key advantages over sysvinit:

parallel start-up of services
distro-agnostic service files
tracks processes belonging to services
socket management for daemons (facilitating parallel startup, lossless reload, etc)
service environment control

It has some useful secondary features (starting services on-demand, dealing with changing hardware) which to my mind are great for portables, but less necessary for servers or desktop systems. And while the more-automatic handling of dependencies is a nice idea, it doesn't seem to get all the edge cases right[1].

So far, so good. And, if you look at Lennart Poettering's initial blog post, those are mostly the things he talks about. Since then, though, systemd has considerably extended its scope to include networking, DNS, time, session management, and so on. You can see from Poettering's blog post a year later quite how much systemd is doing compared to other init systems. And there he talks about systemd becoming a comprehensive platform, and driving standardisation.

And while standards are generally a good thing (e.g. POSIX, the FHS), I don't think "the systemd authors decide what linux looks like and call that a standard" is such a good thing. I say that for 3 main reasons: the init system should be a component of a unix system, not the whole system; the systemd authors seem to replace existing unix components without entirely understanding what they did; and the systemd authors are too "my way or the highway".

A traditional unix system is a series of interoperating components, each of which does one or a few things well. I think that's a reasonably successful model, and it gives our users freedom to switch out particular components to suit their needs. One consequence of systemd's mission creep is that it is proving increasingly difficult to ship a distribution where systemd and any other init are both supported. Debian will do so in bullseye, but it's taken quite a lot of work, and I think everyone agrees that there will continue to be tension between supporting alternative init systems and keeping up with systemd's new features and the tighter integration required to take advantage of them.

Systemd has started re-implementing existing unix services - ntp, a local resolver, cron, etc. Its replacements seem sometimes to suffer from a Chesterton's fence problem; the new implementation seems to not fully understand or value what the traditional one did leading to surprising or incorrect behaviour. And yet they become the default almost de facto as part of the advance of systemd. We had to restore ntp on our ceph servers, for example, because systemd-timesyncd didn't provide a good enough time source. We've had some problems with systemd-resolved just giving up, and it has had a number of interop problems (e.g. with dnsmasq). I'm not sure systemd should be replacing extant utilities conventionally understood to have little to do with init (e.g. ntp) rather than fixing them (or starting a new separate project for next-gen-ntp or whatever), but if you're going to, you need to (IMO) understand fully what those things were doing and why. The somewhat cavalier approach to existing utilities is particularly concerning from people who want to make the new standard.

Which brings me to "my way or the highway". I think it's fair to say that Poettering is opinionated about what a linux system should look like, and that he's not that interested in systemd supporting different setups. That results in both some surprising behaviours and often pretty aggressive responses to bug reports[2] (there's even a "lennart-doesnt-like-it" label in the issue tracker). Standards processes can be time-consuming and far from ideal, but they at least try and get a broad feeling for what use-cases are out there. Having everyone standardise on the systemd way where that seems so hostile to alternative models doesn't seem ideal; and some way for people working on alternatives to have a stable interface to work with would be good.

So what? It seems to me like there ought to be space for an init that does a bunch of the good stuff systemd does, but without the endless scope creep; it would also need to understand systemd service files (at least). OpenRC and runit do some but not all of what you'd need (and I think GNU Shepherd may do, too, but that seems quite Guix-specific); both are usable in Debian bullseye at least. I think you'd want a starting feature set something like

support for systemd service files and sysvinit scripts
parallelised start-up with dependency management
tracking of services' processes
control of services' environments/resource usage
optional socket / dbus management for services
tight focus on service (?+boot) management

It strikes me, though, that this is the sort of application that Rust might be good for, which would give you some useful safety features compared to C while still being performant. Maybe someone will be inspired to write one?

In any case, I think it remains important that users continue to have a choice of init system (not least so when the next big thing does come along, it's possible to transition painlessly), and this is not just about supporting a bunch of dinosaurs who won't be parted from sysvinit. I think that's going to mean a continuing process of working out what new systemd features to incorporate and which to refrain from in the interests of supporting a range of init alternatives.

[0] I think the speed argument isn't all that interesting - my laptop boots up in seconds regardless of what init it's running, and my servers at work spend so long doing POST that how long init takes to do its thing is irrelevant
[1] We had some fun with sssd and trying to make sure services that needed it to be actually running (rather than the process having started but not being able to answer queries) worked OK, and then a mistake meant that restarting sssd also restarted the other services unexpectedly.
[2] as a for-instance: if you try and schedule a delayed shutdown and logind is unhappy for some reason, systemd will immediately shutdown (rather than, say, giving the user a choice). Despite a number of people saying this was really not what you wanted, Poettering declared it was clearly the correct behaviour and closed a PR to fix it, leaving downstream maintainers to apply the fix for their users This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/748479.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Making Thunderbird talk to Google Calendar again

2021-01-17T12:04:26Z

I have a google calendar associated with my work email address, and I mostly use Thunderbird as my MUA. If you have a similar set up, you've probably been using the provider for google calendar - it's the second most popular Thunderbird add-on.

That stopped working for most people late last year, or at least the ability to respond to calendar invitations did. Thunderbird are moving to a new "MailExtensions" framework for add-ons, and I think some part of the legacy framework for older add-ons (like the google calendar provider) has managed to mess up the relevant settings.

Google Calendar does, however, support CalDAV, so you can instead connect Thunderbird to your google calendar thus. The settings to do so aren't entirely obvious, though, so I thought I'd briefly outline how to get this working.

You'll need to know the email address you sign on to google with, and your calendar ID. If you're using your default calendar, that's also your email address (otherwise see [0] below). Then proceed as follows:

File menu -> New -> Calendar
select On the Network; click Next
select CalDAV
Username is the email address you sign in to google with
Location is https://apidata.googleusercontent.com/caldav/v2/CALID/events replacing CALID with your calendar ID
Click Next
Put something sensible into Calendar Name
De-select Show Reminders (otherwise you get reminded about all the past events when it first loads)
Make sure its associated with the correct email address (this is the one you'll reply to meeting invitations with)
Click Next
Click Finish

You should be set; a window will probably pop up and ask you to sign into your google account and allow Thunderbird access to your calendar (say yes!). I found that I couldn't set "Prefer client-side email scheduling" during the creation process and had to enable it via calendar preferences once I'd set the calendar up. Set this if you want to be able to respond to calendar invitations by email.

The bit of this that took a bit of work was the Location setting, which I found in Google's CalDAV API Developer's Guide.

[0] If not, find it in google calendar thus: click the gear and then "settings". On the left-hand pane find the calendar you want under "Settings for my calendars" and click on it. In the menu that appears, click on "Integrate calendar" (or scroll the right pane until you get there). The first item under the heading is the calendar id. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/747469.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Possessor

2020-12-15T17:35:53Z

Intrigued by a pair of enthusiastic reviews in the Graun, I watched this online. It's an eerie near-future scifi horror, where the protagonist (Tasya Vos) is someone who is projected into the mind of other people to take over their bodies to perform assassinations. The work is not without its risks, though, and Vos is somewhat estranged from her family and also starting to perform erratically at her job.

So much of what is going on is either seeing Voss' estrangement from herself and her family or seeing how the people she takes over behaving just a little off-kilter because they are quite literally not themselves. And of course the consciousness of one of the targets starts fighting back...

Also of note is the firm which has staff spying on people through their laptop cameras in order to evaluate their home decor(!) and lifestyle, implicitly so they can be more effectively targeted by advertising.

This is a tense and claustrophobic film, with a not inconsiderable quantity of gory violence, and I'm not sure the plot quite stands up to scrutiny in a couple of places (jvgu fb zhpu grpu, fheryl gurl fubhyq xabj jurer Ibff'f gnetrg vf ng nyy gvzrf?), but it's a pretty effective piece of cinema; I should try and remember to nominate it for the Hugos next year... This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/745366.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

"Rule of 6" lockdown rules

2020-09-14T12:31:35Z

I was hoping to write something about the new rules when they came out, but given that was about 23:38 last night, about 20 minutes before they came into force(!), I went to bed instead. Sorry...

The government is obviously a bit shy about this, as The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) (Amendment) (No. 4) Regulations 2020 don't state the time at which they were made.
Anyhow. This SI amends The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) Regulations 2020, which I wrote about when they were new. As I write, the legislation.gov.uk version of the Regulations hasn't been updated to reflect these latest changes, but they'll probably get there in the next day or two.

So, what has changed?

The main changes relate to regulation 5 on gatherings. Briefly, no gatherings of more than 6 people are allowed unless:

all members of the same household (or two linked households) OR:
- the gathering is at premises operated by business, charity (etc), or public body; or has been organised by a business, charity (etc), political or public body in a public outdoor space and the organiser has risk-assessed
- everyone attends alone or in a "qualifying group" of less than 6 people or 1 household or two linked households
- no-one joins a different group nor mingles with members of other qualifying groups
OR it's one of the following exceptions...

The exceptions (paragraph 3 of regulation 5) are numerous:

elite sports
reasonably necessary for work, education, childcare, emergency assistance, avoiding injury illness or risk of harm, caring for a vulnerable person, access arrangements for children who don't live with one of their parents
fulfilling a legal obligation
support groups (organised by business, charity (etc.), or public body) for e.g. victims of crime, addicts, new parents, LGBTQ, carers, the bereaved
risk-assessed weddings and receptions for up to 30 people (not in a private dwelling)
significant event gatherings (significant milestones, coming-of-age, joining a religion, funerals and similar; NOT birthdays) for up to 30 people on business/charity/public body premises (or public outdoor space) where the manager has risk-assessed
protests organised by business, charity (etc), public or political bodies where the organiser has risk-assessed
participating in (not spectating) a sport or fitness-related gathering organised by business, charity (etc) or public body where the organiser (or facility manager) has risk-assessed
criminal justice accommodation (prisons etc.)
outdoor activities that require a licence (other than driving or selling booze) for organising or participating in or for the equipment, taking place outdoors where the organiser has risk-assessed (I think this is for e.g. shooting)
giving birth, or attending at the request of the person giving birth

Where I use risk-assessed above, it's defined in paragraph 5G, but it's basically a health&safety risk assessment and taking all reasonable measures to prevent COVID-19.

The various local lockdowns (Leicester, Blackburn, Bolton, Manchester/Lancashire/W Yorks) are not relaxed.

Legal twitter thinks this is the first time mingling has appeared in the criminal law. These regulations bring the law and guidelines closer together; they don't have anything to say about social distancing within groups.

Of course, what hasn't changed is the government's continued abuse of emergency powers to pass legislation at the last minute without any form of scrutiny from parliament... This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/741016.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Gideon the Ninth, Tamsin Muir

2020-08-28T17:00:00Z

Gideon is an orphan, and indentured to the service of the Ninth House, one of the houses of necromancers who work for the Emperor. She really wants to escape the Ninth's planet and to go and join the Cohort to fight. There are very few other children on the planet; one of them is Harrow the heir to the Ninth House, who Gideon hates with a passion. Necromancers in spaaace!

I don't want to spoil the plot by saying anything more about what happens. There is horror, humour, violence (really quite a lot of violence at times), a twisty and confusing plot, and a ruins-of-former-glory sort of setting. I was a bit worried by the lengthy dramatis personae that the book opens with (and did sometimes find myself flicking back to it), but actually the characters are very well drawn. The plot is twisty and exciting, and it's very well written.

I didn't quite buy some of the developments of the central relationship, though - perhaps a limitation of only ever getting Gideon's point of view. But on the whole, a very entertaining read. The sequel is just out, which is tempting, but I should get more on top of my to-read first... This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/740321.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeannette Ng.

2020-08-21T16:55:51Z

This was half-price in e-form the other week, and teithiwr recommended it, so I thought it was worth a read :)

In the mid 19th century, Catherine Helstone travels to Arcadia in search of her brother Laon who is a missionary to the fae. She is delivered to Gethsemane the house where Laon lives, and must wait there for his return.

The early parts of this book remind me of the start of Dracula, as Harker explores the castle he is all-but imprisoned in. It's an eerie, unsettling read, and things get darker and more strange as you go on. I found it a bit hard going in places, but the setting is fascinating, and you're never quite sure what is and isn't true. The theology that is argued about by the characters felt genuine, too, rather than being parody or window-dressing.

There are plenty more stories that could be told under the pendulum Sun, although I don't know if a sequel is planned. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/739441.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders

2020-08-12T17:22:05Z

Another of the Hugo novel nominees this year. This is set on a tidally-locked planet, much of which is freezing cold and dark or blisteringly hot. The city we start in has rigidly imposed circadian patterns - you must be inside by curfew, and it's a crime to sleep when you should be awake; later we visit other places with different ideas of how to approach life in this hostile environment.

This is another book that takes a while to get going, and I found the ends of some of the sections a bit abrupt to be properly satisfying; to some extent I think this is because Anders is more interested in the characters and their ideas than the plot per se. But it gets much more gripping towards the end (which has a slightly unsatisfactory maybe there will be a sequel quality to it). And there's a lot here about different ways to run a society, power, trust, and so on. Plus a number of twists that I didn't see coming :)

Recommended - to my mind this is better than Middlegame, for example. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/738883.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).

Middlegame, Seanan McGuire

2020-08-06T18:31:28Z

This is one of the novels off the Hugo Award shortlist this year.

There's a lot going on here - the story is twisty, with alternate realities, a non-linear plot, alchemy, and protagonists who don't know what they're doing. It takes a long time to get going, and a number of the villains are so evil that they're rather 1-dimensional. Some of this is that fairy-tale narrative style that McGuire is so fond of (and has you yelling at the characters at times!). I'm not quite sure it works if you see what I mean - Tim Powers does urban fantasy better, and Use of Weapons has a better non-linear structure.

All of which said, if you have the patience to let it get going, Middlegame does draw you in - both because you want to see how it ends and because you do care about the protagonists. And it does have some delightful turns of phrase. And for all the non-linear plot could feel like cheating, it does hang together, and I felt the author is being fair with the reader. This entry was originally posted at https://emperor.dreamwidth.org/738438.html. View () comments or post a comment (you can use OpenID if you don't have a DW account).